There are various kinds of weedless fishing lures known in the art having retracted hooks disposed inside a lure body that will be snapped open when a fish bites to hook the fish.
In general some of the problems encountered with these lures include: (a) the tendency for hooks to return to the retracted weedless position after initially opening in response to a fish bite; (b) the inability to use a lure both for surface fishing about brush or weeds and for deeper water diving when retrieved in a trolling mode; (c) complex mechanisms difficult to assemble and keep operative; (d) unfavorable orientation of hooks or barbs for hooking and retrieving fish; and (e) mechanisms that involve moving parts subject to excessive corrosion and maintenance under practical conditions of use for fishing, for example.
Spring biassed two-hook arrays have been proposed by H. Vivieros in U.S. Pat. No. 3,492,752, Feb. 3, 1970 for Hook Mechanism for Capturing Fish and other Animals to operate in a mode where an array of two baited hooks attachable directly to a fish line may be releasably held together by a latch that is released to spring the two hooks apart when a fish takes the bait. However this lure has the deficiencies (a) that the hooks may be released to remove the hooks from a fish's mouth except when a fish chooses to mouth both hooks from a direction axially towards the fish line, (b) that the latching mechanism is so unstable that the array is subject to false triggering and snagging whenever the array lightly contacts, weeds, brush or other obstacles in the water, and (c) that the array is not adaptable to surface trolling since water based forces tend to falsely trigger the array.
Hook arrays on artificial bait fishing lures have been arranged for weed free trolling with various mechanisms that release the hooks for catching a fish that strikes at the lure. Typical is the J. Helfenstein U.S. Pat. No. 2,325,247, Jul. 27, 1943 for Combination Fishhook, wherein a trigger plate movable within the lure must be grasped by a fish to release a pair of separate hooks biased for moving outwardly from a weed free position inside the lure. This lure has the deficiency of a critical triggering mechanism that is subject to corrosion and malfunction and which requires a critical fish to bite that must grasp a trigger on the lure and move it longitudinally within the lure.
It is an objective of the present invention to improve the state of the art for weedless self-setting lures by correction of the foregoing problems.
It is a general objective of the invention to provide weedless fishing lures with simplified, easy-to-assemble fish bite actuated spring hook arrays that more reliably respond to fish strikes at the lure.
Other objects, features and objectives of the invention will be found throughout the following description, the drawings and the claims.